The TLC show “Extreme Couponing” filmed two episodes in North Carolina. They featured Winston-Salem, NC based Lowe’s Foods. One of the locations is about an hour from my house. I had wondered what the local reaction was but I didn’t hear anything until today.
It seems they didn’t make a very good impression.
A friend of mine who is a moderate couponer has complained that it’s not as easy to get the big deals as it used to be. Have any of you run into problems since the show started airing?
I think it’s safe to say at this point that if TLC shows up and says they want to do a show about your lifestyle, it’s probably time to rethink your life choices.
It has little to do with the show; coupon values have been getting lower for years. Most often, they’ve changed things from $1 off to $1 off for two items.
No kidding - it’s like being invited on Jerry Springer - no fuckin’ way it ends good.
I expect them any day now.
Coupon specials have been getting better, though. I’m not a die-hard couponer but I still cleaned up at Harris Teeter’s triple coupon week. A few weeks ago they did a super doubles special. You could take any coupon up to $2.00 value and it would double. Plus HT and Bi-Lo offer double coupons up to 99 cents everyday.
As for the $1 off two items thing? That’s why you hit the buy one get one free sales.
I don’t know, the amount of sheer work that goes into extreme couponing could be easily spent… doing almost anything else that makes money. Most of the people that seem to get on that show either have no job (relying on supplementary, i.e. a spouse’s income), or spend pretty much all their free time couponing (dumpster diving for coupons, sorting coupons, doing the math, raiding places for pamphlets and newspapers etc). In this way, it seems like couponing is basically just a full time job. You save about as much money in the long run as you’d make if you spent the same amount of time working a reasonably paying job, you just end up with more stuff you’ll rarely use in your pantry, and less money to spend on “surprises.” It doesn’t seem like hardcore greed, so much as a radically different form of income.
I feel sorry for those poor cashiers though…
I want shelf-clearers to get their heads caved in by falling cans.
I like coupons as much as the next person, but the promos for the show make me really detest some of the participants. One I saw this past weekend (it might have been on a DVR’d show from within the last couple of months, I don’t know for sure) had some woman saying something like, “Yeah, I clear shelves. If you wanted it, you should have beaten me to the store!” I suspect for the best deals, she shows up when the store opens so that no one can do exactly that.
I read one book* on couponing (by the woman who does the Coupon Mom website, I think) where she encourages you to buy anything that turns out to be free or nearly free to be able to donate it to charity if you can’t use it in a reasonable amount of time. That sort of sentiment never seems to make it into the promo info for the show. Instead it’s about shots of people’s in-home floor-to-ceiling shelves stuffed full of sets of identical products; it’s like somewhat more socially-acceptable hoarding.
Exploiting loopholes is just jerkish behavior in my opinion. Retailers could easily put limits and restrictions on coupons but probably didn’t in the first place so people could get what they ‘needed’. But of course someone sees this as their opening to wipe the shelves clear for themselves forcing retailers to put controls in place ruining it for everyone else.
It’s a shame that any retailers attempt to be generous or give a benefit to a consumer is soon to exploited by greed.
I’ve noticed that Price Chopper doesn’t run triple coupons anymore. For a while it seemed like they had them in the flyer about once a month. I’m sure they were losing money on that deal because I always seemed to wind up in line behind some tool with an inch-thick wad of them.
The few times I have watched the show I have been astonished that there are stores that will allow you to run a negative balance due to coupons. All the stores I’ve shopped at cap coupon value at the cost of the item, so you can’t “get money back” and use it to buy other items.
I’ve also been astonished that anyone wants to own 87 bags of croutons.
I haven’t watched the show, but I agree it must be as much work (and probably way more annoying) as a real job. And that’s not counting finding the room to store all that crap. I use a program that tells me when to use coupons so they combine with sales, and I clip out one newspaper’s worth of coupons each week, and I still feel like I spend about 2 hours on it.
As a couple of other people have already noted, it seems the coupons aren’t as good as they used to be. You’re seeing a lot more coupons now where you have to buy three or even four of the item to get the deal.
Also people cleaning out the shelves. If there’s a really good couponing deal on a particular item on any given week, you can bet that most or all of said item will be gone by the time you get to the store. You almost have to get to the place right when it opens to really take advantage of the deals.
In the story linked to in the OP, the grocery spokeswoman accuses the producers of employing some chicanery, including some stuff that the grocery itself was party to. Among other things the story had this to say:
So that is a real thing? A while back I was on facebook and a friend re-posted a picture (from one of her friends) of a receipt where the FOAF had spent something like $131.34 but the final balance after the coupons was -$4.31 with the caption “They paid me to take this stuff out of the store, I can teach you how to do this.” I just figured it was something viral, but watching the discussion under the picture it appears he teaches ‘extreme couponing’…I still wasn’t totally convinced it was real because I couldn’t believe a store would hand you money, you’d think the registers wouldn’t go below zero (do the manufacturers back double/triple coupons?).
Anyways, I was always amazed when my ex-wife would go to the grocery store, spend $130 and save $40-$50 in coupons, and that was with spending no more then 20 minutes a week on it and a bit of good planning for which day to go on and not buying anything we didn’t need or wouldn’t eat in the next month or so. I can’t see spending too much more time then that. Especially if it becomes an obsession.
It really depends on the store policies. A few, including Walmart apparently, will give you cash back if your coupons exceed the total price of the groceries. But most won’t allow any such overages. So if you buy an item that costs, say, $1.50 and have a coupon for $2, you’ll get the item free, but they won’t give you an additional 50 cent credit.
Yeah, you need to take what you see on any of these shows with a huge grain of salt. A friend of a friend was featured on some outrageous kid’s parties show, the taping of which my friend attended. Everything was staged and scripted. They taped segments of the parents rushing around to get things organized and fighting over how much everything was going to cost -but in reality the show paid for and organized the whole thing.
I clip a few coupons each week, and am happy to use things like “Groupons” for services or restaurants or retailers I was already inclined to use… but my problem with extreme couponers is NOT that they’re “greedy.” It’s that, to make extreme couponing pay, that has to be pretty CLOSE to a full-time job.
I don’t mind spending a few minutes a week to save 5 or 10 bucks at the supermarket. But I don’t have the time or patience to do more than that.
Some will also take that $0.50 and apply it towards any other purchases you make, but won’t give it as “cash in your hand.”
I remember one of the episodes had something like that. The woman was at -$1.00, and the store wouldn’t give money back, so she bought a $1 candy bar “for free” to break even since she felt otherwise she would be “Wasting” a dollar.
I admit I’ve only seen the show a couple of times, but most of the people were rather considerate. They often said things like “don’t make enemies with the store, if you plan on getting more than 5 or so of an item, call ahead and ask them if they can special order or hold it for you.”
Not sure how often the people on the show just clear shelves, though. I personally hope that most people are as considerate as the ones I saw.